Re: Providers pay too

Yes you pay your ISP for a connection, but usually the T&C forbid public hosting on a domestic connection.

And this should be made illegal with six or seven-figure fines per violation for ISPs to put these T&Cs. Internet connectivity is both ways, not a "grab stuff from outside" thing only. This is also why CGNAT should be explicitly made illegal as well.

Forbidding end users from hosting stuff or having a public IP is the equivalent of having a landline phone service that can't receive calls. Sure you can call, but it's pretty much useless as nobody can call you.

Interestingly, usage of NAT is one of the main reasons we have this "asymmetrical" data flow problem in the first place! Older IM programs and apps would directly peer between end-users, with the "central server" being used only for IP discovery; see how ICQ used to work in the early days. These days, thanks to NAT everyone has to go through a central server because NAT breaks connectivity everywhere and you can't be sure about anything on the other side anymore.

Re: Patience.

I also did the phased change, but I had the benefit of having all my apartment to myself. When I moved in, everything was 100w incandescent, so what I did was that I let them burn out, then I started replacing the burnt out bulbs with the remaining ones in the apartment that were in areas I rarely used. Only 'till I was down to 3 bulbs did I go and mass-purchase CFLs to substitute all of my bulbs. Then I just left the 100w ones in the rarely used areas, those were substituted as soon as they burned out which did take a while. My whole apartment went full CFL sometime around 2007.

LEDs are still too expensive for my taste, so the few CFLs that have burned out have still been replaced by CFLs. I guess it'll be about 3 years before LED bulbs drop down to the affordable range.

Re: Stubborn arses...

There's an interesting trick around MS not selling Win7 licenses, and you were already halfway there. Install Win7, get the "Windows product not original" message. You will be sent to a site offering to buy a legal license for your OS ... and yes, they will sell you Win7 Pro or Win7 Ultimate, whatever you did install on your PC. I was able to get XP this way long after MS did the same thing with Vista, and I'm pretty sure that Win7 licenses are probably still available through this channel. WGA is probably more concerned with legalizing pirated Windows versions than trying to push the unloved Win8; at this point, users will rather deal with pirated Win7 than get reamed with Win8. MS is better off getting revenue from Win7 rather than no income from pirated Win7.

Normal consumers who unwittingly use counterfeit notes, or who purchase a cloned car, will (upon detection of the counterfeit) have those taken away from them never to be seen again.

Selling counterfeit goods is illegal.

Buying counterfeit goods isn't.

Counterfeit banknotes are actually illegal for very specific reasons, mostly that banknotes are actual legal tender, and if counterfeit banknotes weren't illegal, all banknotes would be worthless as anyone would just simply print their own and pay with them.

Re: The elephant in the room is...(@Corestore)

Who ever made the counterfeit chips is STEALING from FDTI.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means. They are infringing upon patented stuff, or building a trademarked/copyrighted design and having it interface with software they haven't paid a license for, but they aren't stealing anything. There's a reason why copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement and theft are separate things in pretty much any country's law.

Re: Pretty nasty

Counterfeit cash or cards: subject to confiscation upon detection, further use is not permitted

Cloned car: subject to confiscation upon detection, further use is not permitted

Counterfeit USB to serial gizmo: ...

Counterfeit Rolex watch: You get to keep it.

Counterfeit bags: You get to keep it.

Pretty much counterfeit product confiscation is made at country customs, and even then end-users/consumers are pretty much given a pass on that. Why? Because there's a good chance you didn't even know they were counterfeit goods!

The hideous ACTA was trying to criminalize this, but that got shot down thanks to the retarded SOPA/PIPA law in the US that made the world notice ACTA. Sure, they'll try to do TPP, but I'm pretty sure it'll also get shot down.

In fact, there's a good chance that this bricking might have been actually legalized by ACTA. Yet another reason to kill that thing for good.

Re: That's going to cause some problems

Maybe you are right, but chip counterfeiting has reached epidemic levels. If the board manufacturers that buy the chips don't care of they are getting cheap counterfeits or not (because they knowlingly buy from non-authorized suppliers) then it's up to the chip manufacturers to put a stop to it.

Understandable, but bricking counterfeit chips is a bad move in the long run. It would be far easier for FTDI to have the drivers flag a chip as counterfeit, then give this information to the end-user, which will then go to the manufacturer and say "hey, this is counterfeit stuff!" and so the complaint goes all the way up through the supply chain.

Instead, this will only get anger directed at FTDI and/or Microsoft. Manufacturers will probably avoid FTDI altogether instead of risking their hardware getting bricked because one of their suppliers slipped a mickey on their chips.

Re: A pleasant change

How much of that profit is saved wages from the layoffs?

None. The layoffs were done by Microsoft post-NokiaPhone acquisition. Maybe those laid off are going to jump to Jolla. Also noteworthy: a Nokia fund jumpstarted Jolla; so not only Nokia isn't bad on former employees, they actually help them to start up new businesses after they leave.

Re: 2-factor?

If they are doing it properly, it should be asking for token auth every time you log on, or at least on first logon after power-on and after waking up from sleep. Which would make it impractical for most regular users that aren't used to this.

2FA makes a lot of sense for sensitive stuff, or online services where money is moving, such like e-banking. It doesn't make sense for laptop access, unless you're carrying sensitive data in which case you would already have some extra measures in place anyway.

What's the purpose for 2FA on Windows? I fail to see the usefulness for local logins with 2FA. And I'm saying this as someone who is perfectly OK with 2FA on banking sites (I carry at least 4 physical tokens with me).

Meh.

2-Factor auth... Good!

... Tied to a smartphone ... Not!

... Using an actual token (in the smartphone) ... OK, as long as it works like the Battle.net one

... Not supported in BlackBerry ... BAD. Come on, every other virtual token solution supports it, if they can be arsed into supporting it, so can you! Or maybe MS is still butthurt that BB still has more market share than their failing mobile OS?

Not to mention that a large part of the US Gov, including the DoD only allow BBs on their network...

Interesting!

I was kind of expecting Congress to pass something like that, or bring up "Clipper: The Sequel". But then they're having a big election next month and nobody wants to be the idiot who killed liberty in "the Land of the Free".

At least Senator Darrell Issa is consistent; he opposed both the hideous SOPA/PIPA thing and the equally horrible ACTA. Nice to see a congresscritter on the real citizen's side for once.

You got it wrong

Apple (and every other manufacturer) can already carrier lock a phone.

But carriers are the ones that actually carrier lock phones, not manufacturers. You're also seeing the problem backwards: the real issue is that you can't swap out your SIM and use a different device if you want/need to. And a soft SIM will be locked permanently as well, so it's just going back to the dark ages of CDMA which I won't ever go back. The SIM card is an issue of consumer freedom and should not be allowed to be turned into yet another lockdown method.

As it is, phones can be SIM unlocked in most civilized countries for free, for a fee, or by some h4xx0r dude.

Re: Back to the eighties you go!

Indeed. For us, this was still true even way into the 2000's, as GSM was introduced somewhere around 2002 or 2003. This is also why I refuse to do business with any carrier that still uses the awful SIM-less CDMA.

I've always seen the use of a physical SIM card as giving the user total liberty in choosing both which handset you want to use, and which carrier you'll get. Over here in Mexico, Virgin Mobile has entered the market as an MVNO and the smartphones they're pushing over have dual-SIM capability. Which means you gain the ability to keep your older SIM and phone number while beta testing the new mobile operator. It's also very useful for those who wish to have a backup line in case your main carrier goes down.

Software SIM would be a giant step backwards in consumer liberties. It's VERY BAD and telecom regulators everywhere should make this outright illegal for anything that isn't legacy (CDMA, AMPS, the legacy SIMless stuff obviously doesn't support SIM cards).

Re: Intel is selling tablet SoCs for approximately 7 cents each

But the numbers, and the contra revenue [1], says that Intel are pretty much giving their SoCs away at zero cost (leading to losses of $1B or so per quarter). And yet the volume builders, especially those without significant other Wintel dependencies,are still just not interested in x86?

Looks pretty good. It's about time Intel lost its empire over all computer-ish chips. At least it'll balance the force, as it tipped towards Intel with the awful decision of having the next-gen gaming consoles saddled with Craptel x86.

Re: So...

Elop made a strategic decision which would have worked if his business partner hadn't been so clueless about the merits of its own product.

This is where the Elop defense collapses. Most people in the IT world that weren't tied to the MS ecosystem knew this could and would fail, including the reasons why it ultimately failed. There was also a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that buying into the MS mobile solutions leads to market loss and bankruptcy: the latest example would be Palm, and HTC almost got killed though it seems to have survived in a sense ... thanks to Android.

Betting on a new revolutionary OS is a good bet... as long as it isn't MS behind that "revolutionary OS" as they usually gravitate around Windows and they can't think away from that. We all know that Windows on the phone is useless. Even licensing BB10 would've been a better bet for Nokia!

Re: Active Sites versus All Sites

IIS is irrelevant - "Other" is more popular, and even Google was at one point.

I'd also note that Java Application Servers might also have a better market share than IIS. Of all the banks in my country, only two use IIS. The rest are running some kind of app server, usually IBM's WebSphere.

This section is reeking of MS shills

Even if we take out that the 37% figure from previous months was artificially pumped up by Chinese linkfarms, 37% is nowhere near "overtaking all FOSS web servers". Yet it is stated a lot by "AC"s who seem to be pushing up MS as the best solution. Try harder, astroturfing/shilling is easily noticed over here.

Re: @FF22

But not for the last few months - IIS was previously ahead with the highest market share of sites of any web platform.

Not if you added up Apache + nginx sites. Even with the July 2014 stats, they made up 37.53%, which means that more than 60% of all web servers were running something other than IIS. And even then, most of those servers were actually Chinese linkfarms anyway. If you're going to shill MS, do it with better datasets.

Re: Class action law suit

Microsoft repeatedly defended the Win8 UI on the grounds that their "telemetry" contradicted the nay-sayers.

Their telemetry was severely broken then. Because pretty much all beta testers were complaining about Metro and were doing the registry hack thing to disable the hideous Start Screen until one of the releases outright removed that ability and rammed Metro up all the beta testers asses. That might have given MS the "wanted" telemetry, as nobody could do otherwise.

Re: What Freaks Me Out...

Everyone has always been looking for those backdoors. Remember NSA_KEY? The hacker community has been very suspicious since the early 2000s. We probably only need better SSL/TLS protocols or just use them for everything, as it seems that is spooking more the spooks.

Now that BB10 devices are no longer tied to BIS, it's possible that they are now harder to tap than the old devices. Also notice that the NSA was able to h4xx0r Merkel's Nokia handset ... but they weren't able to do the same to her BB Z10. Quite interesting...

Oh please...

Setting up a recursive search BIND is easy peasy. If you are really concerned, configure iptables (or ipfw) on the box to only allow incoming queries from ISP-controlled networks and/or configure BIND to only serve their networks.

Anyone relying on 8.8.8.8 who isn't a mortal user is being extremely lazy!

Re: Oh please...

Ah, so the best way to address that is be insulting, instead of finding a way forward that works for all. That validates what the guy says.

Nope, it's actually the other way around. He was originally told "hey dude, we have the UNIX philosophy stuff, maybe you should read this" and he dismissed it as utter crap. That is, he's coding stuff for a thing he absolutely hates. This is akin to Stallman doing code for Windows. Would you really expect Stallman to play nice with MS developers, especially given his hostility to propietary code?

Yes, I know about the Linux prima donna effect. In fact, the way someone refers to Linux itself will raise red flags (or yellow flags) on his attitude. Does he/she insist on saying "GNU/Linux"? There's a good chance you've got one of the hostile dudes. But in Lennart's case, it seems he's a prima donna himself!

Oh please...

The systemd developer saying the Linux kernel dev community is awful? Has he seen his own work? systemd is awful and one of the worst things that Linux has ever got saddled with in the last 20 years! Not to mention that part of the Big Leap Forward with systemd is killing text logs, now they're some weird binary format. Yeech!

I'm also guessing that many of Linus' hostility would probably be because his code is crap as well. See, the shouty man may not be nice all the time, but it doesn't mean he isn't right.

Re: Be careful what you wish for...

Icon for those who need to re-read "1984", then look at China, and think twice about giving the government the power to neuter the internet.

Regulation of Internet packet prority treatment isn't the same as regulating internet content. The FCC can simply declare internet providers as "common carriers" and that would bring internet regulation in line with telephone operators. The government hasn't been censoring phone lines, has it?

If you're really, really concerned about "internet censorship", you should not only be for Net Neutrality, you should be asking for laws to make CGNAT illegal as it allows ISPs to block incoming internet traffic if they want to do so. (in a phone analogy: it would be like you paying for a phone that can only make calls, but can't receive any calls at all.)

Re: Dan Paul "He's got a pen"...

And can we cut the crap with this Net 'Neutrality' misdirection? It has nothing to do with 'neutrality', it's just a word the anti-capitalists have seized on because Net 'socialism' wouldn't go down so well with the American public.

Net Neutrality has nothing to do with socialism. It has everything to do with double-dipping; telcos are already charging you for bandwidth, and they want to charge an extra 'extortion rate' on content providers to prioritize their traffic lest they get stuck in the slow lane. The problem is that the content provider is already paying for bandwidth on his end.

There's a good chance that a non-Net Neut internet will still see U.S. telco's not investing on infrastructure, instead sitting their asses while they rake in the big bucks they get from double-dipping subscribers and content providers alike.

Obama is getting a clear message from the American public. He should ask for Wheeler's resignation. NOW.

Now it makes sense!

And in other news, a new report by Poitras and Peter Maass reveals that the NSA uses undercover operatives to subvert foreign companies and telecommunications networks, having done so in China, Germany, and South Korea.

And Finland. So that's what Elop was really doing! Subverting a foreign company!

Re: It could have been so different

Um, what exactly did he do to benefit MS?

MS wanted to Borg a phone manufacturer to raise their WP installed base, as most of their usual OEMs were flocking to Android. Nokia had one of the largest shares in the smartphone market, and somehow MS thought all those Nokia users would keep buying Nokia even if the OS was switched to Windows Phone. Instead, it was "Palm: The Sequel" as everyone just flocked to Android or iOS.

He did what the mothership ordered him to do, now if that was good for MS is an entirely different matter.

N900

I had high hopes for Nokia after playing with an N900. Not just on the OS, anyone remember the transflective display it had? It was probably the only phone you could read in daylight, and the transflective feature meant more battery life. Maybe we'll see a spiritual successor from Jolla?

Re: No-one gets away scott free

While I agree with your assessment, who on the board would realistically have pulled that trigger? Firing a brand new CEO with clearly no planned replacement strategy would have only doubled down on the share nosedive, and then the firer has then just committed the same offence as the firee.

I'll say a name here, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Leo Apotheker.

While HP might not be swimming in the McDuck Moneybin's worth of $$$, the decision to axe Leo after his stupid gaffé is probably the reason we still have an HP vs. having it go down the acquisition route which befell good old companies like DEC, Tandem, or Sun Microsystems. See the difference:

- Elop sends the Burning Platforms memo and kills pretty much Nokia's value overnight. Board keeps him. Nokia Mobile is no more, now Borged by Microsoft and the way things are going, that's where it will die.

- Leo sends the Burning PCs memo, causing an instant 25% drop in HP shares. The board axes him about 1 month after this stupid, stupid move and backtracks on it. HP is still alive.

Re: Inevitable

I've no doubt it won't take them much effort at all to port OS X to ARM and I wouldn't be surprised if they've already done it.

Technically, they already did it. iOS is basically a cut-down OSX to the core, which is what gave Ballmer the grand idea of using the NT kernel for the next WinPhone iterations. Of course, he forgot that OSX uses a far more suitable microkernel (Mach) while NT is still a monolithic monstrosity. I'm guessing that the only things that actually require porting are the apps themselves, as most of the base system is already ported to ARM.

Screen resolution on netbooks

Reading websites on the first generation of netbooks was a shit experience, due to the screen aspect ratio and poor resolution. It might have been almost okay if the screen rotated through 90º to 'portrait', but they didn't.

I blame the HDTV market. PCs in general have always been 4:3 and had no need to change said resolution, but somehow 16:9 became the new "hotness". 16:9 is crappy, 16:10 is still far wider than what I need but at least the height is workable. The suckiness of 16:9 was just more noticeable with the netbook because of the reduced resolution they had. If anything, netbooks were the kind of product that would have benefited of a plain old 4:3 screen...

Re: This sounds like Windows 8 territory

There was a much earlier version of 'one click to launch' icons as an option in the finder in pre-OSX days (OS 8 perhaps?), introduced at the same time I think as the 'coverflow' option.

I think every OS with a GUI has added this 'feature' at some point. I know KDE has it (and the places where I haven't disabled it, it's because I don't know how to do it), Windows9x added it around the time they brought the "Active Desktop" feature and made it the default option on new installs (this is how I learned how to disable the feature) and now I learn they added it on MacOS as well (can't remember seeing it, last MacOS Classic version I used was 8.x but I was more familiar with 7.1 and 7.5.5. I'm still used to call it System 7, which will probably give away how old I am...

Re: The "giant iPad" rumors have been around for several years

I've always thought it would make a lot of sense to have the iPhone/iPad capable of running the OS X GUI and API as an app

This. It should be obvious to anyone that if convergence is to be achieved, it would be by having a phone acting by a full-blown computer once "docked" to PC-like hardware and thus making a second PC redundant. The Sinofsky/Ballmer take on this was the opposite: force the phone UI on desktops which turns your awesome PC into a useless giant phone.

I remember seeing a Motorola phone w/Android back in 2011 that could be "docked" to a laptop-lookalike-thingy which turned it into an Android laptop. That looked awesome enough to get us looking at this as a viable substitute for laptops, yet we never saw Motorola (or anyone else) going down this path. It is far more useful than Win8.

Re: This sounds like Windows 8 territory

Would Apple dare to go down a desktop / ios approach?

They've already kind of done it with Launchpad. Something nobody uses. Other features like those due to come in Yosemite are probably less jarring and might be accepted. I for one dislike they're reverting the Dock to 2D flatness. I'm also less impressed with their switch to Hipstervetica as the new System font. But all in all, Apple hasn't had a Windows 8 moment on OSX, and thanks to MS they probably know it is a bad idea.

I doubt they'll try something like this. They may have done dumb changes (i.e. iOS 7 UI) but they seem to have kept it mostly on the sane side. They're probably taking note that nobody actually wants a tablet/phone UI on their full-blown computers, and that the Surface devices are a disaster.

Re: Microsoft scrapping WP royalties

Had Microsoft had zero royalties for WP7 from day one, back when Android was a fuddled mess in the 1.x and 2.x days, they probably would have had a much better market share.

I doubt it. Windows Mobile had a rock bottom share since forever, and anything associated to Windows Mobile would usually see their market shrink & die in a matter of months, or years if they were really lucky. See Palm, Sendo, even HTC. It isn't really a wonder that WP7 also dragged Nokia from #1 OS (Symbian) to "right next to the Other category". It also didn't help that when MS dumped WinMo 6.5 for the full rewrite WP7, they had already done the "dump & rewrite" trick a couple of times already. Remember Windows CE? A lot of stuff was deprecated/obsoleted when they dumped that in favor of Windows Mobile. Some devs commented that they were feeling deja vu on the whole issue; the thing is that by WP7's announcement, it was far more profitable to develop for iOS or Android than the dying WP/WinMo ecosystem. Hell, even BlackBerry looked more promising than WP!

Re: I do wonder

The reason that Samsung pay Microsoft is that Microsoft spend a far higher percentage of revenue on R&D - and Microsoft accordingly have a much stronger patent portfolio.

Nope, the reason Samsung pays Microsoft is because Microsoft has been pulling a SCO on the main Linux players and claiming that Linux uses MS patented stuff, but fail to produce the "offending" code. They just FUD their way into extortion, and up until now, both the Linux and the Android players have just ponied up the cash. Samsung has probably reached a point where it can actually bring up the fight against Microsoft. It would be interesting to see those patents either invalidated or proven not to be infringed at all, SCO-style. You'd think the IT industry would learn its lesson from the SCO fallout, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

I remember those days

... when I could bring up my old handset and have it linked to a new contract. This would enable me to avoid the compulsory 12/18/24-month period and be able to terminate my contract with only a 30-day notice. It's been years, maybe a decade since that ability went away as "bring your own phone" is no longer an option. I know, I tried to do this back in 2007 with my PAYG phone.

However, one thing I do know is that you might sign up for a 12, 18 or 24 month mandatory term contract ... but this is a minimum length. You can hold on to your contract after the mandatory term ends, and you'll be able to do the 30-day termination notice if you hold to it. This is why my carrier starts nagging me around my "expiration date" offering free handsets just to get me on a new contract. I also get a plus as I rack up more "client points" which make my next upgrade choice cheaper, and I get out a longer lifetime out of my current smartphone. My previous one (BlackBerry Bold 9700) lasted me 3 years, and would've probably lived longer had I not made the mistake of upgrading it to BBOS 6 (it couldn't handle that OS). I'm probably going to go down the upgrade path early this time round, but mostly because my current phone was obsoleted earlier than expected. I hope my next choice doesn't go down the same route...

Lycos?

Re: Harvey's law

If the hotel is crap enough and expensive enough that will not help either. Example the Etoille convention centre (nowdays Grand Hayatt) in Paris. Last time I was there (IETF 2011) it was killing any persistent sessions _INCLUDING_ port 443 and disallowing IM (so you use the hotel phone you know).

There are ways to getting around this as well, let's just say that I've encountered most of these scenarios. Yes, I'm including the persistent session killing on port 443.

Hotels should wise up on the fact that they aren't going to stop a skillful hacker from getting his/her unrestricted internet access. We're willing to pay for internet access (even if it is far more expensive in some hotels than what it should be), but we expect unfiltered access to the 'net when doing so.

The US is a weird place

Over here in Mexico, all hotels have free WiFi. The more expensive ones might have a login/password thing to check you really are a guest in the hotel, but that's as far as they'll go. Public spaces will sometimes have free internet, others have "infinitum movil" where you have to log in with your ISPs login/password combo.

In the US, even wired internet is charged per-24hour access and it is too damn expensive. Oh, and they charge per-device fees. Meanwhile, most if not all public spaces are 100% free. Weird...

Re: curious how it works

Having monkeyed with aireplay-ng and the whole set of tools, this can be done easily. Use airodump to scan the area, you'll get all MACs and to which BSSID they're associated with. Simply ignore the ones associated to your own infrastructure's BSSID, send deauth packets to the rest of 'em. Rinse and repeat.

The only people I know that do this fake deauth packet business are those interested in cracking WEP or WPA. It is considered DoS and it's probably illegal under FCC rules. I'm surprised the FCC only slammed them with a $600k fine, I would hand them at least a $6 *million* fine to discourage not only them but any other establishment from doing this.

Re: A small step in the right direction

De-authing networks does have it's legitimate uses though. For instance in a business environment where people shouldn't be using their own Wi-Fi or plugging in unauthorised equipment in your buildings but do so anyway.

If you're concerned with people plugging in unauthorised equipment, you should have actual MAC filters in your level 2&3 switches, not doing illegal DoS on the airwaves. I remember from my college years that the Cisco Catalyst 2950 has a "protected" mode for switchports where you could lock a port to a single MAC address. I would expect beefier stuff to have these kinds of security.